God, and a stubborn mentor, helped turn street-savvy school dropout Matthew Pakkala into a focused high-achiever

It’s an unlikely pair of protege and mentor sitting at the small kitchen table in an social housing apartment on Nanaimo Street north of Hastings: the principal of a west-side French immersion elementary and a youth bred in the Downtown Eastside and eminently more streetwise than book-wise.

It’s the sort of Professor Higgins-Eliza Doolittle relationship of George Bernard Shaw’s greatest play Pygmalion.

In this case the professor is Krystyna Niziolek, principal of Ecole Jules Quesnel on Crown and 16th.

Her protege is 17-year-old Matthew Pakkala, who has had the distinction of being kicked out of just about every school he’s ever attended. And there were many.

If Pygmalion was about redemption from ignorance, this is about redemption from worse conditions than that.

It’s a tale of a boy’s childhood overshadowed by lives blighted by addiction and mental illness at home and of a school principal who — as much guardian angel as educator — helped him survive it.

Niziolek first met Pakkala in 2006 when she was vice-principal of Hastings Elementary and he was 10 years old, well on his way to academic failure but showing great potential for earning an A in juvenile delinquency.

Today, every Monday finds them sitting at the kitchen table in Matthew Pakkala’s grandmother’s apartment. Last Monday, they were pondering the intricacies of the periodic table of the elements.

That he was there being tutored by Niziolek — instead of tearing up the neighbourhood with his former friends — is testimony to the influence an educator can have when she sees a spark of something special in a kid whose life appears to be a disaster.

“Sometimes when you have a child acting out in the playground, you forget who the child actually is because we focus on the behaviour. We don’t see the little gem of goodness inside and that’s my job — it’s every teacher’s job — to be able to tease that out of a child,” said Niziolek.

Back in 2006, Pakkala was such a handful at Hastings elementary that he was spending more time in Niziolek’s office than in the classroom.

It didn’t take her too long to discover he couldn’t read.

“He was Grade 1 level at best. So I thought if this kid’s going to be spending so much time with me I might as well teach him how to read,” she said.

She asked what interested him. Wrestling, apparently.

So they went to a nearby drugstore and she bought a wrestling magazine and taught him to read it.

Niziolek still has the cover of that 2006 magazine as well as a copy of the first letter he ever wrote — to the editor of the magazine praising the virtues of one of his heroes. It’s attached to the back of a framed photograph of him reading a book.

“That was him then,” she says bringing out the photograph during an interview in her office. “This cute, little pudgy kid, that I’d have to bribe with chocolate milk to get him to learn.”

As if being taught to read using wrestling magazines wasn’t exotic enough, she had to come up with something else to keep him going.

“I had a bullet from Pearl Harbor and he got all interested in that, so we’d learn all about Pearl Harbor. Then it was sharks, so I got some shark skin and a shark tooth — anything to keep his interest.”

When he refused to come to school, she would go to his father’s apartment to cajole him into attending.

One day she saw his bedroom furniture consisted of just a plastic lawn chair and a Safeway shopping cart to hold his clothes.

When Niziolek left Hastings elementary, the boy went into a spiral.

“She left when I was in Grade 7. It was a big support pulled away and I remember I got kicked out that year. Then I went to a whole bunch of elementary schools — I got kicked out of all of them, three in one year,” he said.

Niziolek tried to keep tabs on Pakkala. She would talk to the schools he was attending, however briefly, and would try to keep in touch with his family.

She would drop by their home once in a while, but sometimes the family had moved and she couldn’t easily find them.

By now he was hanging out with “a rough crowd”, he said, but that’s a part of his life he clearly doesn’t want to discuss.

“I started acting out — I didn’t have Krystyna and I think that was part of it — and when I went to Eagle high I got kicked out of there, too. They gave me a lot a chances but I got worse and worse. I lasted about a third of the year then on the last day of school I was sent to the South Vancouver Learning Centre and then I stopped going to school altogether.”

Niziolek didn’t see him for about three years and often wondered what was happening to him “because you worry about a kid like that.”

Then one Saturday morning two years ago, while she was at school, her phone rang. It was Matthew’s mother.

“I talked to her and then Matt got on and told me what he was doing and it was amazing. He told me all that had happened to him, that he was playing hockey, back at school, had given up his old friends — I was overjoyed,” she said.

It appears that at the age of 14, when his life was a shambles, he had had an epiphany.

One night his grandmother, worried that he was not at home, began searching the neighbourhood.

At three in the morning, she found him sitting on the steps of St. Francis of Assisi church on Napier Street.

What was he doing there?

“Thinking about my past. Thinking of all the things I had done with my friends, it sorta haunted me. I still have flashbacks,” he said.

He still doesn’t know if he found God, or God found him, but eventually he stopped sitting on the steps and went inside.

“2010 was a complete 180 degree year for me. Something inside me just took me there,” was the best he could do to explain it.

A while later, he was passing the South Vancouver Learning Centre when some students saw him and shouted out.

“Anna, the principal, then came out and asked me to come inside. She said ‘what are you waiting for, why don’t you come back to school?’”

He showed up the following Monday.

At school, he met a kid he had known before and made fun of.

“When I saw him, I apologized. He never expected I’d ever do anything like that but he told me about the hockey program at Britannia (Community Centre) and told me to go,” he said.

Pakkala would spend so much time at the rink trying to catch up with kids who had been playing hockey since they were four that when he went home in the winter he was only comfortable with the heat turned off and all the windows open.

It was at this point in his life that he reconnected with Niziolek.

This time when she saw him, he wasn’t a little pudgy kid anymore but a lean and muscular athlete who wasn’t causing trouble but was singing in the choir at church.

“He now volunteers for the Free The Children organization and has grown into a wonderful young man,” said Niziolek.

She says he wants to attend the Free The Children camp in Ontario for two weeks this summer although where he will get money for the airfare and expenses is anyone’s guess.

“Kids like this never leave the four square blocks around their homes. Getting to Toronto is never going to happen.”

(Niziolek and his teachers are looking for bursaries that might help finance Pakkala’s trip and have applied for a Vancouver Sun’s Adopt a School grant. )

Last September, Pakkala was accepted into the Britannia Hockey Academy, a school district program that combines a full academic course with hockey training each school day. It was a dream come true, he said.

His ambition — like every Canadian kid with a hockey stick in hand — is to play in the NHL but by Christmas he found himself struggling with his Grade 10 assignments.

If he couldn’t keep up, he might lose his spot in the academy.

He turned to Niziolek for help.

She now spends part of each Monday over at his home helping with his week’s assignments.

“My kids, and kids like them, do well because we’re there for them, driving them to sports, helping with homework, but kids like Matt don’t have that support. They have to do everything for themselves. On top of this, he’s become the emotional support for that family.

“But there have been a lot of people who have helped him, his teachers, his hockey coaches, the priests at his church. For me it’s a privilege. He’s been an inspiration.”

Sometimes, when he’s riding the bus to hockey he sees his old friends.

“They’re doing the same old things and they tell me how cool it is and I think how fortunate I was to get out of it. I pray for them and thank God all the time.”

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God, and a stubborn mentor, helped turn street-savvy school dropout Matthew Pakkala into a focused high-achiever

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